Hark, what a sound, and too divine for hearing

Hark, what a sound, and too divine for hearing. Frederic William Henry Myers* (1843-1901). Most of this hymn is from St Paul, a poem in 150 stanzas written when Myers was an undergraduate, and entered for the Seatonian Prize at Cambridge (it was one of the very few occasions in which Myers did not win the prize for which he had entered). He published the poem in 1867, when he was a young Fellow of Trinity College, during a brief period in which he was converted to Christianity by Josephine Butler, wife of the vice-principal of his old school, Cheltenham College. The poem was dedicated to her. The usual hymn text is a four-verse one, often slightly altered, the verses beginning: Hark, what...